Hip-Hop Chess Founder Speaks at Harvard

Hip-Hop Chess Federation Founder, Adisa Banjoko recently spoke at Harvard about the connections between Hip-Hop, chess and martial arts. Here is a short clip from that talk. A longer audio version will be ready soon. Learn more about upcoming HHCF events at www.bishopchronicles.com or follow on Twitter @hiphopchess

This guy could be a visiting professor at Harvard these days or maybe a Nobel Peace Prize candidate or winner. But when it comes to chess, if the Harvard students want to learn anything ... they should visit Webster University ... home of the Champions!

1. How does playing chess "give a person a moral compass?". Of course you don't need religion to have a moral compass, but I don't see how Chess fits into the equation. It's just a game.

2. "Where is the Rock equivilant of 50 Cent, telling what he did.." "There is none!" Uh.. There are plenty of Rock musicians that have come out with autobiographies talking about how they made it.. And more importantly, what does this have to do with anything?

3. Martial arts, Hip-hop, and Chess all came to America at the same time? I don't think so. At most we can discern that a few rappers also liked chess and martial arts movies.

Don't get me wrong, it's good that they are trying to teach kids positive thinking, but everything else about this video is just stupid.

Now-a-days the "cool", "in" thing is to dump religion and worship the earth, the moon, a plant, an animal, or even put one's self up as God. Those both in and out of their ivory towers endeavor to find connective tissue between various subjects and put forth their abstract ideas on how it will pan out.

No offense to California or those who make a career of organizing, but the ideas/theories and results are purely political and most of the scenarios would only be viable in a Utopia and don't hold water in the real world.

hip-hop, chess, and martial arts are all cool but this guy's reasoning is kinda flawed. does chess really give us a moral compass without a forced religious dogma? i think most chessplayers would agree that this is drawing a long bow.

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